yawned. “Do you have a girl waiting for you at home?” she said, trying to make conversation.
Bill shrugged. “Nope.”
She didn’t know why she cared, considering she was hitchhiking and she’d never see him again after tonight, but that small bit of information about him seemed sad. “Do you have other family in Mattison?”
“Yeah.”
Darcy shrugged. Of course, he did. He’d already mentioned siblings. Obviously, he wasn’t in the mood to talk. “Would you rather I be quiet or do you need me to talk to help you stay awake?”
“Naw, I’m fine. It isn’t that late yet, and we’re trained to do without sleep. It’s part of the job.”
“Oh. I’ll just shut up then. When we get to town, you can drop me off, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“No problem.”
Darcy wondered how much company she could be, sitting there like a bump on a log. She felt about as useful as training wheels on a tricycle, but she was grateful not to have to make idle conversation. Just being in Bill’s strong, silent presence was comforting.
The quiet companionship would be over too soon, she thought as they passed a road sign announcing that Montgomery was thirty-eight miles away.
Thirty-eight miles. At seventy miles an hour, that meant about thirty more minutes in his company. Thirty-eight miles and Bill would drop her off at some motel. Thirty-eight miles and she could get a good night’s sleep and then figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
Montgomery was big enough to have several hospitals, she supposed. Hospitals were always short of nurses. Maybe she could get a job at one of them and start over free from pressure from her family. Free of Dick.
Then she wondered if it wouldn’t be better to just keep going without letting anybody know where she was. Even Bill Hays knowing that she had ended up in Montgomery might bring Dick and her family to her.
No, she wasn’t trying to hide from them. She just didn’t want to deal with them for a while. She needed time to get her head together. She wasn’t ready to face Dick, her parents, or even Uncle John right now.
She wanted to be just plain Darcy and to have the luxury of time to explore who that really was. Dick Harris and the Stanton family with their long military tradition couldn’t seem to understand that.
Darcy leaned back against the seat, pillowed her head with her bent arm against the window frame, and closed her eyes.
THE LIGHTS of the city loomed ahead of him, and Bill sighed. In just a few minutes, Darcy would be gone.
The roadside information signs indicated a wide selection of discount motels at the first exit, and he sighed again. He engaged the turn signal and started to ease into the right lane.
Then Bill looked across the seat to Darcy, sleeping on the seat beside him. Yes, he knew she expected him to stop at a motel in Montgomery, but she looked so peaceful curled up there that he didn’t have the heart to wake her. What had made her so tired that she dropped off next to a stranger? He flipped the turn signal off and remained on the highway.
There were plenty of other motels on the road ahead before they got through Montgomery. Who said they had to stop at the first one? Darcy hadn’t. She could get a room at the last one out of town just as easily.
Bill drove on through the sleeping city, then he drove past the last Montgomery exit, crossed the Alabama River and approached the first off-ramp for Pittsville just a few miles from Mattison. There were fewer motels here, but they were close.
Close to what? he asked himself. Or maybe to whom?
And why was he attracted to this woman he’d just met? It wasn’t as if he were looking for a woman, even if he had time for one. Duty, physical training, night school and his mother kept him busy enough for three men. The last thing he needed was any distraction from his goals.
But what a distraction Darcy would be, he couldn’t help thinking. He’d practically been a monk since he’d left high school and home. He’d wanted so much to pull himself out of the near-poverty he’d been raised in that he’d devoted all his time to the air force, to getting the education his mother couldn’t afford to give him, to making something of himself.
If he could just get his degree, he could obtain an appointment to Officer Training School, become an officer and gain respect in the world. After almost ten years, the degree was in sight.
But there were times when he had a few minutes to himself that he couldn’t help realizing just how lonely that climb toward the top had been. He looked at Darcy and wondered how it would be if….
No. He shook his head. He didn’t have the time.
He realized suddenly that as he’d been woolgathering, he’d driven right through Pittsville. Now what? He looked at Darcy asleep on the seat and shrugged. He could save her the cost of a night’s stay in a motel and put her up at Momma’s. There might be a time later on when she would need that money.
He could drive her to Montgomery in the morning.
He yawned and stretched and looked for the familiar landmarks near his home. He saw the old Shell station on the corner, closed now, but still bearing the familiar orange sign. The station had once been adjacent to a motel, but the motel had been closed since before he was born. The interstate had gone through, and the traffic on the Mattison highway had dwindled to nothing.
There was Mrs. Scarborough’s house three miles down the road from the little farm where he had grown up. He passed the Popwell’s place and Maggie Montoya’s restored house, then he saw the dirt road home. He eased on the brakes and steered onto the lane.
Darcy stirred. “Are we in Montgomery yet?” she said through a yawn.
“Hush, Darcy,” he said. “We’re home.” And that simple statement seemed so right, that it needed almost no explanation; although he knew he owed her one. “You were sleeping so soundly, I didn’t want to wake you. Momma’ll have a bed for you, and we can figure out what to do tomorrow.”
Darcy seemed to have heard his explanation, but she didn’t react. Was he going to have to explain again? Would she be angry that he had taken her home? Now, he wondered if he’d made a mistake by not dropping her off in Montgomery as they’d planned.
“Oh. Okay,” she mumbled, confirming his suspicion that she wasn’t fully awake.
Bill wondered again what had exhausted her so that she’d succumbed so completely to sleep. Had there really been a car broken down by the road? Or had she hitchhiked all the way? That would explain her exhaustion.
As he parked in front of the house, he realized with alarm that the lights were still on. Was Momma sick? Or had she simply fallen asleep in front of the television?
The family had tried to get her to accept live-in help, but she always brushed them off, saying she didn’t want a stranger in her house rearranging things, making it not her own. When she was ready for help, she’d tell them. Bill wondered if she was finally ready.
Then he looked up, surprised, when his mother flung open the screen door and stood at
